The study by
Like many Black Americans, Edwards moved to Chicago in the early twentieth century during the Great Migration. The mass migration of Black Americans radically transformed the urban, cultural and political landscapes of Northern US cities. Despite being a refuge for Black Americans, Chicago was not exempt from Jim Crow, and it became a deeply segregated metropolis. Fascism in Chicago is analysed through the concept of anti-Black US fascism, which emphasises anti-Black exclusionary behaviours aimed to preserve White Americanness. Anti-Black US fascism therefore recontextualises the legal and civic exclusion of Black Americans, through Jim Crow and segregational New Deal policies, as a mode of fascism. Therefore, reorientating racially segregated spaces such as exclusionary white spaces and Black ghettos as constructed fascist and anti-fascist urban spaces.
However, the unique urban landscape quickly connected the historical labour and immigrant radical cultures of Chicago to the oppression of Black American migrants. Inspired by Chicago’s radical milieu and global anti-colonial struggles against European fascist expansionist foreign policy, many Black Americans expanded the language of fascism to explain their lived subjugated experience in Jim Crow US.
A leading figure in this movement in Chicago was Thyra J. Edwards, a Black American anti-fascist born in 1897. Edwards championed interracial solidarities through her social and political work and tireless anti-fascist internationalism. Through her experiential knowledge, the study offers insights into how her non-sectarian, antiauthoritarian, antifascist socialism evolved. She believed that democratic and peaceful interracial relations could exist, a belief that stemmed from her own interracial relationships throughout her life. Edwards’ anti-fascism is global in its perspective and informed by her numerous sojourns to Europe, particularly to the Nordic nations and the Soviet Union. This led Edwards to develop an anti-fascism that was rooted in local concerns but also part of global struggles against fascism and the far-right.
Therefore, the case study of Black antifascism in Chicago offers scholars new perspectives on the boundaries of fascist and anti-fascist thought and history, and the impact of urban space and government policy on the development of anti-fascism in the US. Moreover, it emphasises Chicago and Black American’s importance in the history of global anti-fascism.